Originally published at BlueGreenBlog. You can comment here or there.

They are not at all at odds - but it requires some learning and serious thinking to realize that one’s health is directly related to the health of the environment. Alternet currently has a brilliant article: Six Ways That Changing Your Life Can Change Global Warming.
What prevents people from doing more and paying attention to environmental topics? Peter Michaelson thinks it boils down to fear: Fear of insignificance, powerlessness and hopelessness, fear of rejection and mockery of the things we care about. Blasé is in; passionate is out. Trivia and consumerism rules our lives, and the culture of the US has been anti-intellectual and anti-education for a long time.

Francis Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet lamented that in the US, people are put down as naive for thinking they can change the world. In Argentina, she pointed out, people tell their children that they are naive if they think they cannot.

Originally published at BlueGreenBlog. You can comment here or there.

We’re speaking, of course, of the stuff called Triclosan. It’s present in most soaps and toothpastes and possibly other personal care products, even soaps that aren’t loudly proclaiming their antibacterial properties.

Funny thing is, the marketing of antibacterial soap, dish soap, hand-sanitizers would have people believe that soap alone is no longer enough - and this is a convenient but definite lie, preying upon people’s fears of sickness and the desire to keep their families healthy. It also exploits the ignorance that most people have of how prevalent use of Triclosan will actually speed the ability of microbes to develop resistance.

The main property of any kind of soap is to give water the power to pick up grease and dirt. The slipperiness of soapy water allows us to wash microbes off our hands and bodies and down the drain, where we can stop worrying about them. Killing microbes is only necessary if you’re a surgeon.

(Ongoing research on allergies even hints it is healthy to be occasionally exposed to some relatively-harmless bacteria, training our body to react to those instead of developing more inconvenient allergic reactions to pollen, dust mites and dander.)

More reasons to give “anti-bacterial” products a miss:

Producing Triclosan on the large scale we do now not only takes resources but produces pollution that includes dioxin-like compounds being released into the environment - chlorinated Triclosan falls under this category. Dioxins are nasty business, and all living organisms suffer from exposure to these cancer-causing substances.

In addition: You can now file Triclosan as an endocrine-disruptor (another one to add to the list we’re exposed to everyday in perfumes, cosmetics, pesticides, certain plastics and so on). Kind of important if you happen to be an animal whose body is regulated by hormones! Germ fighter works as endocrine disrupter

WIKIpedia: Triclosan, Soap, Endocrine_disruptor, Dioxins

Worldwatch Institute: Soap